The Importance of RSS (in a Nutshell)

It's been around for a while now (really taking off around early 2006), but it's still a mystery to most web users — so what is the big deal with this RSS stuff anyway?

There are two reasons you should care. First, if you're a web person, information junky, or just someone who likes to read the news from more than one source -- it makes your life easier. Second, it makes it easier for your customers, friends, and anyone else interested in your blog/news/information to keep on reading and keep up to date with your content.

There is a third, less often mentioned reason that may overshadow everything else: the almighty web search. If there is a set of data that a computer can easily use to figure out that "oh look, this has been updated since I was here last," it makes things like Google's indexing a lot easier. This is why many blogs and news services with RSS feeds see their content indexed almost instantly by search engines.

It may seem extraneous ("my content is already up and public, why do I need RSS?"), but the machine-readability of RSS can only help the search engines understand what you're writing and how fresh it is. This means RSS will help people find your content, as well as stick with it over time. If you have a site you want to monetize -- or are just looking for world domination -- you need RSS.

Save the date

A quick thought for push-based marketing. If you are trying to market for a specific event, do you:

• Keep the date of the event in front of your customer from the beginning, possibly losing immediate interest (because they feel like there is time to shop around or just not enough urgency yet), but providing a useful reminder that the event is coming up?
  
• Mention the event, but don't tell the customer a specific date (to create a sense of urgency -- "oh no, I should buy something now for Father's Day!")?
• A combination of the two (assuming you have multiple opportunities), for example not mentioning the date until it is imminent (again, all about urgency), mentioning the date initially but not after the first e-mail or flyer?

Not being in E-commerce, my opportunities to test this are limited, but it seems like something that could be a significant factor. Now is the time the ridiculous Amazon customer base would come in handy. Test away!

Old, but Good

A little marketing joke to start the week.

The Best Advertising isn't Advertising

When you watch or experience something that makes you grin, laugh or even cry — does it matter that someone is paying for it to promote their brand? I say no. Just because the experience was carefully crafted to have that effect does not diminish the effect, nor cheapen it.

The subtle, logical inclusion of people taking videos and speaking on their cell phones sends the message in retrospect, but it isn't obtrusive -- it makes sense. The branding value of this (hello viral) is enormous.

Trust, Play and Creativity

Why do we lose our creativity over time? Why, as adults, are we not supposed to "play" anymore -- not video, card or board games -- but really play. Blocks, Lego, forts, tree-houses, cardboard boxes, Nerf guns -- these are "kids games."

Here's a very interesting presentation (~28 minutes) by Tim Brown about the relationship between play, creativity and even learning, again from TED (I wasn't kidding when I said I was going to watch as many of them as I could). I've been thinking about the benefits of play for a while now, but if you've ever wondered why, other than cool factor, all these super-successful, creative companies like Google and Pixar have such an investment in their "fun" -- this is why.

"We need trust to play and we need trust to be creative."

Creativity, Fulfillment and Flow

An interesting video posted by SEO Black Hat about "Creativity, fulfillment and flow."

This reminds me a great deal of the Conscious Competence learning model, but about the relationship between skill and challenge rather than skill and awareness. (To sum up two complicated topics in one, rather inadequate sentence.) Very worth the 19 minutes.

I suspect I will be writing an overview of the Conscious Competence model in the near future.

I also think I'll be watching as many of these Ted talks as I can get my eyes on.

If Google Were a Person...

Someone mentioned to me today that Google's quarterly revenue is $5.5 billion.

That means the company makes a little under $42,000 per minute, before overhead, all day every day. At first this seems utterly stunning -- especially given the going salaries these days -- but how many AdWords clicks does it take to generate that money? If the average click costs $2, that's 21,000 clicks per minute. Of course that seems insane to most of us small-timers, but for the reach and reputation of Google it doesn't seem particularly impressive. Even if the average click is only $1, the 42,000 clicks required to get that revenue doesn't seem that overwhelming for the mighty giant.

The great part about this, from a business standpoint, is the ability to spend time working on high-value activities (HVAs) while the money-making end of things practically run themselves. For Google, this means they can spend time working on improving the process, improving the profitability and the long-term value of their business while AdWords chugs along. They can explore new possibilities for revenue streams; ones involving their existing technologies (Gmail, for example, shows you unobtrusive ads but hosts your e-mail for free) as well as completely new avenues.

Most companies simply don't have the luxury. Google's constant innovation is not really so surprising, since they have time to get to their non-urgent, important activities. The rest of us spend so much time putting out fires (our urgent, important activities) and making sure things run in the day-to-day that the small amount of time we have for improving the business as a whole takes a long time (forever, if we're unlucky) to manifest positive results. As the saying goes, you must work on your business to be truly successful. not just in it.

Here's the fun part: if Google were a person, working 50 weeks a year with 9 hour work days, they would make $9,777,777 an hour.